The School Governors' Handbook

J A Partington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134798872
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The pace of change in education has continued to accelerate since the 1988 Education Act, and even experienced school governors are often bewildered about their duties and responsibilities, as well as what is actually happening in primary and secondary classrooms nowadays. What do school governors do? How can they manage their role most effectively?
The School Governors Handbook has been the most definitive and widely read book on the subject since it was first published in 1980. Written by Ted Wragg and John Partington, two of the most respected experts in the field, one of its' great strengths has always been its mixture of up-to-date authoritative information and humour. In this third edition, all sections of the book have been substantially revised to take account of the many changes in governors' duties that have been brought about by recent legislation.
As governors rarely receive any specific training for their important role, this book is an essential guide to the legal and practical aspects of governorship. Sections cover:
* recent legislative changes in funding and school management
* opting out
* governors responsibilities, including budgets, staffing and drawing up whole school policies
* how to run effective governors meetings
* curriculum and assessment issues
* school inspections
* how to manage difficult situations, including child abuse, discipline, equal opportunities and pupil exclusions

Chapter 1
How governors fit into the education system

When governors are appointed, they usually want to know the answers to questions such as: How do schools work? What power do I have? What can I do? What can I not do? We attempt to answer some of these questions here.

WHO’S IN CHARGE?

The short answer of course is that Parliament is supreme and can do whatever it wants to do in education whenever it sees fit—and it must be said that since 1980 it has been very busy indeed, as most readers will be aware from the press. There have been several major Acts of Parliament and a vast number of detailed regulations based on them. The Secretary of State for Education is a member of the Cabinet. He or she heads the relevant government department in London. The department used to be called the ‘Department of Education and Science’, but was then renamed the ‘Department for Education’ (DFE), on the grounds perhaps that it was better to be for education than against it.

The Secretary of State is required by law to ‘promote the education of the people of England and Wales’, and has power to ‘direct’ any local education authority or school governing body to act ‘reasonably’ if it is feared that they are going off the rails. This does not mean, however, that Secretaries of State can play the dictator and stop developments simply because they disagree with them. They should only act over something which ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’ would think unreasonable, to quote Lord Denning in the High Court. It should also be said that Secretaries of State only rarely make use of this legal sledgehammer, preferring instead to persuade and cajole.

When the earlier editions of this book were written in the 1980s, we could still talk about some sort of equal partnership in education between the Department for Education, school governing bodies and local education authorities. Since the early 1990s this is much less the case. There has been a considerable shift of power away from local education authorities towards school governing bodies and towards the Department for Education, so much so that there is real concern about the future of local education authorities.

Some people fear that the public accountability of schools will be lost if local education authorities disappear, others argue that nothing could exemplify local government better than locally elected and appointed school governing bodies consisting of parents, teachers and others with a real interest in their own school. It was, sadly, the case at one time that local education authority representatives on governing bodies were caricatured popularly as sleeping through most governors’ meetings, stirring only to raise their voting hand in favour (sometimes both hands) when the chair (usually of the same political party) gave them some pre-arranged cue.

These changes have come about through legislation which requires local education authorities to delegate budgets to schools and give governors responsibility for spending the money. Since the 1988 Education Act parents can even vote for their school to sever almost all links within their local education authorities, a process known as ‘opting out’. If they do, their school becomes a ‘grant maintained’ school and receives its funding directly from the Department for Education. We return to these themes later.

School governors nowadays carry a lot of new responsibilities and work very hard. There is talk of governor stress and drop-out. Jokes about schools providing folding beds for exhausted governors after weekly meetings are only a bit far-fetched. That said, very many enjoy the new challenges and it is clear that a new breed of governor is emerging, particularly governors with business interests (very useful for matters to do with budgeting), catering interests (the school meals budget can sometimes make or break a school), governors with a strong interest in ensuring that schools relate well to their local communities. There are also governors with professional knowledge about schools and education, who can make a real contribution alongside the head teacher and teaching staff, without feeling squeezed out by ‘local education authority policy’.

These changes hit governing bodies very suddenly and quickly in the late 1980s and governors were by and large caught unawares. The demand for governor training grew, and local education authorities were put into the unenviable position of having to provide training which would have the effect of doing themselves out of much of their work.

These changes have also brought problems. Despite enjoying their new status in the education system, governors have become aware that without specialist local education authority staff, such as school inspectors, subject teaching advisers, administrators, accountants and legal experts, many of whose jobs at County Hall have disappeared, they can have difficulty getting day-to-day advice when they need it. This is why governors who have relevant expertise are much sought after. Employment law, for example, is a tricky area, and governors are nowadays responsible for hiring, firing and paying staff.

An issue which one suspects that the government did not foresee was that, however keen governors are, someone has to ‘police’ the system as local education authorities used to do. This is in no way to suggest that governors are criminals, but rather that innocence and ignorance combined can entrap even the most sincere and devoted. People who feel angry, cheated or defrauded by what school governors do on occasion can take legal action like any citizen. But this is time-consuming and expensive and cannot compare with a phone call or visit to the local education authority or a local councillor, who, as often as not, could put right small things at least, quickly and with a minimum of fuss.

As this situation has emerged, so the Department for Education itself has had to take on more and more and more of this work. It has abolished for the most part Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools (usually known as HMI) who used to be the eyes, ears and trouble-shooters of the Department for Education. The mainstream staff of the Department for Education have little first-hand experience of schools and do not pay regular visits as HMI widely used to do. They can operate only through a stream of regulations called Statutory Instruments, which actually form part of the law of the land. It is doubtful whether the Department for Education is nowadays as well informed about what is going on in the nation’s schools as it used to be. Some of the bureaucracy and accompanying regulations appearing would be hilarious if they were not so serious.

Keeping up with all these is a time-consuming part of a governor’s work, although by using a system of governors’ sub-committees each with its own specialist area the burden can be shared. Governors then need to know only those regulations which affect their immediate work. All governors should ensure that they have access to copies of these regulations: a good idea is to get the governing body to invest in a volume containing all the regulations—and preferably a loose-leaf volume which can be up-dated quickly. There should be one available at every meeting.

To give an idea of the areas covered by regulations, here are a few gripping titles:

Education (Special Educational Needs) Regulations 1983

Education (School Records) Regulations 1989

Education (School Government) Regulations 1989

Education (Areas to which Pupils and Students Belong) Regulations 1989

Education (School Teacher Appraisal) Regulations 1991

Education (School Inspection) Regulations 1993

There are also literally dozens of sets of regulations about the National Curriculum and various subjects within it, which maintained (‘state’) schools have been obliged to follow since the Education Act of 1988. Governors can safely leave most of these to head teachers and teaching staff, although any governor with a particular interest is very welcome to indulge in a bit of bedtime reading. They are just as effective as sleeping pills and less harmful: some teachers even find them a good laugh. There is a lot of truth in the old saying that a group of experts together can be as dotty as anyone else. In 1994 the National Curriculum was made simpler, and we deal with that matter in Chapter 5.

WHAT DO LOCAL EDUCATION AUTHORITIES DO?

Although their powers have been reduced, local education authorities still do have responsibilities. Some of the duties which they used to carry out have been transferred from them to the Funding Agency for Schools (FAS) which came into being in April 1994. This body was set up to administer the funding for the grant maintained schools. However it is obvious that in any area where there are large numbers of grant maintained schools, there is a danger that local education authorities and the Funding Agency would start to fall over each other, hence the need for the Secretary of State to decide who does what. Very briefly then, the traditional duties of local education authorities are to:

• Ensure that there are enough school places available for their area. They do not have to make all the places available in their own schools. They can make arrangements with independent schools in their area, but must pay the fees if they do. It is only the total number of places which is important. Parents cannot insist on a school place in a particular part of town or in, say, a denominational school.
• Finance their schools. The Education Acts never say anything directly about how well local education authorities must finance their schools, however. That is left to local and national politics, although some expenditure—teachers’ salaries, for example—is laid down nationally by law, and local education authorities and governors would get into trouble by failing to spend accordingly.
• Under certain circumstances provide pupils with free transport to school.
• Ensure that all children in their area are educated. Notice that the law does not require children to go to school: parents can make any arrangements they like to educate their children, but they must satisfy the local education authority that their children are being properly educated.
• Make sure that schools receive their delegated budget funds.
• Make sure that the National Curriculum is fully taught. Incidentally, pupils do not have a right to be taught according to the National Curriculum: local education authorities have a duty to provide it. If a local education authority could satisfy the Secretary of State that it cannot provide all or part of the National Curriculum, then the disappointed pupils would be helpless.
• Ensure that religious education takes place and that pupils attend.
• Ensure that pupils with special educational needs are suitably cared for.
• Ensure that there are facilities for pupils to eat meals and other refreshments. Local education authorities since 1980 do not have to provide the meals or refreshment if they do not wish.
• Make arrangements for medical and dental checks.
• Arrange for parents to express preferences about which school they would like their child to attend. Parental choice of school has turned out to be a tricky area since it was formally introduced in 1980. It is certainly a good thing that local education authorities must ask all parents what they would like. There can be no guarantee, however, that parents will be granted their choice. Governors of popular and over-subscribed schools are frequently involved in explaining how they choose children from all those who apply (schools must have so-called ‘admissions criteria’). Disappointed parents can also appeal and governors can be involved as members of Appeals Panels which local education authorities must set up as and when needed.

Incidentally, lawyers are increasingly concerned that the right to choose a curriculum and to appeal over exclusion are given to parents, but not to pupils themselves. One wonders how many pupils are put at a disadvantage by what their parents do in these respects. An intelligent young teenager could be forced into an unsuitable education by intransigent parents without even the right to be consulted. Readers of biographies will be aware of how many well-known figures had this experience.

• Provide a careers service. Advice on careers is usually available within each school, but the local education authority can provide careers advice to all.

DIFFERENT TYPES OF SCHOOL

Over 90 per cent of children go to local primary and secondary schools which are funded out of public money. Yet all schools are not the same. Decisions about the form which schooling should take have often been made at local level. That is why there is such a variety of schools in the United Kingdom, compared with many other countries which have a uniform type of provision. The origins of certain kinds of school lie deep in the past. Other schools are of more recent vintage. Most of this book is aimed at governors in local authority maintained primary and secondary schools. However, there are thousands of governors of independent and other types of school which are outside the control of the local authorities, so we go into a little more detail below about being a governor of such other schools.

Voluntary schools

Voluntary schools are the direct descendants of schools which were going concerns before Parliament began to take an interest in education during the nineteenth century. Originally these schools were self-supporting and received their funds from fees, bequests, endowments and any other available sources. As the state system of schools expanded it became clear that the places in those schools were vitally necessary to ensure education for all. At the same time the value of the schools’ assets was dwindling (often they had old, out-moded buildings) and their original endowments were being eaten away by inflation, so that some form of government subsidy became both desirable and necessary. Since 1902 the financial responsibility for these schools has rested with local education authorities and they are included in the school places which local education authorities must make available for their area.

As a governor of a voluntary school you will find then that your school is owned not by the local education authority but by a trust or charity representing the original owners, going back perhaps hundreds of years. Years ago the churches and monarchs often founded schools (Henry the Eighth founded Eton College), as did craft guilds (Coopers, Tanners, Haberdashers and Merchant Taylors, for example) and many wealthy individuals. Somewhere in the office of the clerk to the governors there will be an old trust deed explaining your founder’s intentions for the school.

Some members of your governing body will be called ‘foundation governors’. On top of all their other obligations as governors they are there to ensure that as many of the founder’s intentions as are still possible shall continue, regardless of how long ago they were created. It is not possible here to list all the things you might find: most commonly there may be a requirement that the school should teach the Jewish, Anglican or Roman Catholic faith or that your pupils should come from a particular area. As well as attending all routine governors’ meetings, foundation governors often have separate meetings of their own. They must make sure that ‘the char...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1: HOW GOVERNORS FIT INTO THE EDUCATION SYSTEM
• CHAPTER 2: GOVERNORS’ RESPONSIBILITIES
• CHAPTER 3: BEING AN EFFECTIVE SCHOOL GOVERNOR
• CHAPTER 4: GOVERNORS’ MEETINGS
• CHAPTER 5: LIFE IN SCHOOL
• CHAPTER 6: ISSUES IN EDUCATION
• CHAPTER 7: DIFFICULT SITUATIONS
• CHAPTER 8: NOW THAT YOU’RE A GOOD SCHOOL GOVERNOR
• APPENDIX: TEACHERS’ PAY AND CONDITIONS DOCUMENT: CONDITIONS OF EMPLOYMENT OF SCHOOL TEACHERS
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY